Yamigishi
BACKER
2021
This review contains spoilers
Metroid is probably my favorite Nintendo serie, and Super Metroid is one of my favorite game of all time, if someone asked me my top 3 games ever, it would be part of this top. I’ve started playing the serie when I was in highschool, so about 8 years ago, and I immediately fell in love with it, even tho I never played the 3D games except the first Prime. When Metroid Dread was announced, I was really excited to see how it would turn out, but also a bit worried it wouldn’t meet my expectations. Spoiler alert: it did meet them, and even surpassed them in some ways.
Before the game release, I did replay through Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion (in that order), I didn’t really try to speedrun them but I did use a few speedrunning tricks in both Super and Zero Mission, and for every game I tried to go pretty fast. Super Metroid is gonna be my main point of comparison for this game because imo it’s the best game of the serie, at least prior to Dread.
First, I’m gonna start with what I didn’t like about the game, but none of these issues are major, far from it.
I think that while the sound design is still very good, the music of the game is not as good as it could be. Super Metroid had a lot of really awesome atmospheric tracks, and while ZM/Fusion are less good in that regard, they still got some pretty good songs. In Dread, the music is kinda just there, never bad, but also except for a few cutscenes, never really good either.
The lack of interconnectivity between the areas is also something I’m not a big fan of. You do get some hidden elevators to go to new parts of previous areas, but you never end up opening a door to get through a new area, it’s always using an elevator. The areas themselves are… A mixed bag. The backgrounds in this game are really good, you can see a lot of care put into them, but every E.M.M.I area looks similar, and I think the lack of really good music makes the areas more forgettable than in Super, which is a shame because I really like how they look.
My biggest grip with the game however is about the lack of sequence breaking. I know that most of the sequence break in Super Metroid is done using glitches so shouldn’t be used as a point of reference, however Zero Mission had a couple of really cool ones you could do if you were skilled enough. (early super missile, early varia suit, beating Ridley before Kraid, etc…) Obviously, I haven’t experienced the game enough (I didn’t do a 100% run) and speedrunning strats are always found after a lot of playing, however, i did manage to snag an early power bomb to find out…. I was unable to use it until i got the actual power bomb upgrade. I totally understand that from a dev standpoint, having items too early can totally break the experience you want players to have, but at the same time, I feel like part of the appeal of the serie is to try and find out way to get around that, so seeing that really feels weird to me. Also slightly related, I’m not a big fan of the wall jump being scripted like in Fusion, which prevents you from doing single walled wall jump, but the game was also designed with that in mind, so it’s not that big of a deal. The shinespark also feels like it’s not that useful because you have to manually run and your base speed is high enough that i never really felt like using it.
EDIT: after playing a bit more of the game i learned that there is still some sequence breaks, like getting the grapple beam and bomb before kraid which lets you one shot his second phase, you can also get the gravity suit early etc... I'm keeping that part of the review up for archiving's sake but you can actually consider it to not be accurate anymore.
Except for those issues, the game is simply phenomenal. I won’t even mention the story because spoilers, but it’s there, and it’s honestly pretty good.
First of all, the movement is absolutely amazing. Samus never controlled that smoothly before, and having a full controller for the first time in the serie history really feels right: no more awkwardly pressing select to use the missiles, the 360° aiming feels awesome, having a button to quickly morph just feels natural, even using the grapple beam isn’t a pain in this game. As in every other Metroid games, you start with almost no abilities and slowly rebuild your full power, with some new abilities added and those new abilities feel very clever, I really enjoyed them, even if some of them end up being replaced by way more powerful abilities from previous games (like you get a double jump, but later on you also get the space jump, which is kind of a shame because the double jump really feels out of place because of it)
Samus being the best she’s ever controlled is for the best, because this games features something none of the other games of the serie really got: really awesome bosses. Most of the bosses in Metroid are not that fun to fight, they’re pretty quick to kill or require some really simple strategy. In Metroid Dread however, the bosses are nothing to joke about. For example, Kraid is back, but while he’s a big pushover in Super/Zero Mission, in Dread he killed me more than once, but it never felt like it was bullshit. The bosses in this game are like Dark Souls bosses: they’re challenging, but their patterns are easy to figure out if you pay attention, and 99% of the time when you take damage or die, it feels like it’s your fault, and emerging victorious never felt so good in a Metroid game. There’s a couple boss i didn’t particularly like, but the rest of them is extremely good, by far the best the serie has to offer and even the video game medium in general imo, the final boss in particular was some of the best final bosses i’ve beaten in a video game.
Speaking of bosses, Metroid Dread features not one, not two, but three kinds of recurring minibosses: the E.M.M.I, and two kinds of Chozo warrior. The first kind of chozo warrior is alright, the first battle against one of them is awesome but i feel like having it being a recurring miniboss wasn’t necessary, and even lessens the impact of the first fight. The E.M.M.I are very good: every area of the game has an E.M.M.I zone, where you’ll have to proceed with caution, because if you don’t, the E.M.M.I is gonna chase you, and if it catches you, you have a tiny window of opportunity to parry but missing it means game over. Your goal is to manage to find a way to reactivate your Omega buster, and once you do, blast the E.M.M.I’s head off, which is also very dreadful, because you can’t move while charging your shot, so if you miss, the E.M.M.I will get you. Every E.M.M.I has different properties, and I really loved them, they’re really good at pressuring you. The final type of recurring boss is the “corrupted chozo warrior”, and it’s by far my favorite. When I first beat one, i was excited beyond belief at how cool the boss battle was, and then after playing more I met another one and realizing that i’d fight them again made me scream of joy, this boss is one of the most fun boss to fight and you do it multiple times!
And finally, a Metroid game wouldn’t be a Metroid game without exploration. (just pretend Metroid 2 doesn’t exist) And in this game, I sometimes felt lost, and that was purely amazing. At some point, I found a new upgrade, and spent almost half an hour trying to find where to go: once I did, the path to take felt almost wrong, and multiple times during it i was wondering if I was even going the right way, or if i would just end up finding a dead end with a few powerup. The Metroid Dread world is really well crafted, I haven’t explored all of it yet but I can’t wait to do so on my next run, trying to 100% the game feels like a huge but rewarding challenge.
If I had to rate this game, I’d probably give it a 9.5/10. I have some very minor issues with it, but some of them may go away with time, and the sheer quality and quantity of good stuff far surpasses those issues, I feel like I haven’t even mentioned everything I loved about the game, and the best part is, I don’t even know everything about it yet. This game was first rumored in 2006, and honestly, I’m glad it got cancelled and delayed to today, because I don’t think it would have been able to achieve a tenth of what it was trying to do on a DS. Every Metroid fan should buy this game because if you liked a Metroid game, you’re guaranteed to love this one. And if you haven’t played a Metroid game yet, I’m not sure if this one is the best one to start with because it’s pretty challenging, but I’d heavily recommend trying out Metroid Zero Mission first, and play through the rest of the serie before coming to Dread
Before the game release, I did replay through Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion (in that order), I didn’t really try to speedrun them but I did use a few speedrunning tricks in both Super and Zero Mission, and for every game I tried to go pretty fast. Super Metroid is gonna be my main point of comparison for this game because imo it’s the best game of the serie, at least prior to Dread.
First, I’m gonna start with what I didn’t like about the game, but none of these issues are major, far from it.
I think that while the sound design is still very good, the music of the game is not as good as it could be. Super Metroid had a lot of really awesome atmospheric tracks, and while ZM/Fusion are less good in that regard, they still got some pretty good songs. In Dread, the music is kinda just there, never bad, but also except for a few cutscenes, never really good either.
The lack of interconnectivity between the areas is also something I’m not a big fan of. You do get some hidden elevators to go to new parts of previous areas, but you never end up opening a door to get through a new area, it’s always using an elevator. The areas themselves are… A mixed bag. The backgrounds in this game are really good, you can see a lot of care put into them, but every E.M.M.I area looks similar, and I think the lack of really good music makes the areas more forgettable than in Super, which is a shame because I really like how they look.
My biggest grip with the game however is about the lack of sequence breaking. I know that most of the sequence break in Super Metroid is done using glitches so shouldn’t be used as a point of reference, however Zero Mission had a couple of really cool ones you could do if you were skilled enough. (early super missile, early varia suit, beating Ridley before Kraid, etc…) Obviously, I haven’t experienced the game enough (I didn’t do a 100% run) and speedrunning strats are always found after a lot of playing, however, i did manage to snag an early power bomb to find out…. I was unable to use it until i got the actual power bomb upgrade. I totally understand that from a dev standpoint, having items too early can totally break the experience you want players to have, but at the same time, I feel like part of the appeal of the serie is to try and find out way to get around that, so seeing that really feels weird to me. Also slightly related, I’m not a big fan of the wall jump being scripted like in Fusion, which prevents you from doing single walled wall jump, but the game was also designed with that in mind, so it’s not that big of a deal. The shinespark also feels like it’s not that useful because you have to manually run and your base speed is high enough that i never really felt like using it.
EDIT: after playing a bit more of the game i learned that there is still some sequence breaks, like getting the grapple beam and bomb before kraid which lets you one shot his second phase, you can also get the gravity suit early etc... I'm keeping that part of the review up for archiving's sake but you can actually consider it to not be accurate anymore.
Except for those issues, the game is simply phenomenal. I won’t even mention the story because spoilers, but it’s there, and it’s honestly pretty good.
First of all, the movement is absolutely amazing. Samus never controlled that smoothly before, and having a full controller for the first time in the serie history really feels right: no more awkwardly pressing select to use the missiles, the 360° aiming feels awesome, having a button to quickly morph just feels natural, even using the grapple beam isn’t a pain in this game. As in every other Metroid games, you start with almost no abilities and slowly rebuild your full power, with some new abilities added and those new abilities feel very clever, I really enjoyed them, even if some of them end up being replaced by way more powerful abilities from previous games (like you get a double jump, but later on you also get the space jump, which is kind of a shame because the double jump really feels out of place because of it)
Samus being the best she’s ever controlled is for the best, because this games features something none of the other games of the serie really got: really awesome bosses. Most of the bosses in Metroid are not that fun to fight, they’re pretty quick to kill or require some really simple strategy. In Metroid Dread however, the bosses are nothing to joke about. For example, Kraid is back, but while he’s a big pushover in Super/Zero Mission, in Dread he killed me more than once, but it never felt like it was bullshit. The bosses in this game are like Dark Souls bosses: they’re challenging, but their patterns are easy to figure out if you pay attention, and 99% of the time when you take damage or die, it feels like it’s your fault, and emerging victorious never felt so good in a Metroid game. There’s a couple boss i didn’t particularly like, but the rest of them is extremely good, by far the best the serie has to offer and even the video game medium in general imo, the final boss in particular was some of the best final bosses i’ve beaten in a video game.
Speaking of bosses, Metroid Dread features not one, not two, but three kinds of recurring minibosses: the E.M.M.I, and two kinds of Chozo warrior. The first kind of chozo warrior is alright, the first battle against one of them is awesome but i feel like having it being a recurring miniboss wasn’t necessary, and even lessens the impact of the first fight. The E.M.M.I are very good: every area of the game has an E.M.M.I zone, where you’ll have to proceed with caution, because if you don’t, the E.M.M.I is gonna chase you, and if it catches you, you have a tiny window of opportunity to parry but missing it means game over. Your goal is to manage to find a way to reactivate your Omega buster, and once you do, blast the E.M.M.I’s head off, which is also very dreadful, because you can’t move while charging your shot, so if you miss, the E.M.M.I will get you. Every E.M.M.I has different properties, and I really loved them, they’re really good at pressuring you. The final type of recurring boss is the “corrupted chozo warrior”, and it’s by far my favorite. When I first beat one, i was excited beyond belief at how cool the boss battle was, and then after playing more I met another one and realizing that i’d fight them again made me scream of joy, this boss is one of the most fun boss to fight and you do it multiple times!
And finally, a Metroid game wouldn’t be a Metroid game without exploration. (just pretend Metroid 2 doesn’t exist) And in this game, I sometimes felt lost, and that was purely amazing. At some point, I found a new upgrade, and spent almost half an hour trying to find where to go: once I did, the path to take felt almost wrong, and multiple times during it i was wondering if I was even going the right way, or if i would just end up finding a dead end with a few powerup. The Metroid Dread world is really well crafted, I haven’t explored all of it yet but I can’t wait to do so on my next run, trying to 100% the game feels like a huge but rewarding challenge.
If I had to rate this game, I’d probably give it a 9.5/10. I have some very minor issues with it, but some of them may go away with time, and the sheer quality and quantity of good stuff far surpasses those issues, I feel like I haven’t even mentioned everything I loved about the game, and the best part is, I don’t even know everything about it yet. This game was first rumored in 2006, and honestly, I’m glad it got cancelled and delayed to today, because I don’t think it would have been able to achieve a tenth of what it was trying to do on a DS. Every Metroid fan should buy this game because if you liked a Metroid game, you’re guaranteed to love this one. And if you haven’t played a Metroid game yet, I’m not sure if this one is the best one to start with because it’s pretty challenging, but I’d heavily recommend trying out Metroid Zero Mission first, and play through the rest of the serie before coming to Dread
Really barebones and insipid story until you get to level 50 (which takes a lot of time), filled with a lot of filler quests up until the end. The gameplay also is extremely boring, and as someone who doesn't give a fuck about all the social aspect of the game like glamour etc, nothing in vanilla FFXIV was worth putting hundreds of hours in: the music is good, but that's the only positive thing i can say about the base game. I did like Heavensward and i know the other expansions are supposedly better (with the exception of Stormblood maybe) but while i plan on playing them, so far HS alone isn't good enough to redempt ARR.
A big improvement next to A Real Reborn. The story in HS is good from start to finish, with barely any filler, and while i didn't get me as emotional as some other people did, i totally agree it's definitely on the level of a Final Fantasy story. The gameplay did get better, it's still not something i do enjoy tho. And the music once again is absolutely gorgeous, i think the songs for Ishtar and the dravanian lands are up there with some of the best tracks the serie has to offer.
vanilla KH3 sucked on crit by being too challenging in the wrong way but this DLC makes the hell that was crit worth it, if you love tough but fair bosses Remind has 14 of them that range from just decent to some of the most fun bosses i've played, and the majority of them are more than just decent. I still have to beat the final boss in it but slowly getting better at handling him is a blast
The new story bits kinda sucks imo but i didn't like the story of KH3 anyway and nothing can change it, so maybe if you liked base KH3 you'd enjoy it idk
The new story bits kinda sucks imo but i didn't like the story of KH3 anyway and nothing can change it, so maybe if you liked base KH3 you'd enjoy it idk
2003
nothing broke me harder than learning the gameplay didn't suck on purpose
2022
i've "only" played 23 hours of this game as of writing this but i think i can safely say this is my favorite game of all time unless the rest of the game drops the ball really hard. It takes everything good from previous souls game, and adds its own things on top of it, the open world is so good and feels so natural for the serie you really end up wondering why it wasn't always like this, and the fights are as fun and challenging as ever
Vandham daniel ar ar ar ar ar ar ar
1998
Unlike other mecha animes, Xenogears focuses on the characters and not the robots
None of those characters are british this game sucks
I liked the part when the bad guys said "it's moebing time" and moebed all over ouroboros
A huge setback from Heavensward, Stormblood really just feels like it’s A Realm Reborn 2.0.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.
1993
i liked the part where you turn a rose hologram into a skull
A good story that’s, in my opinion, really being brought down by being in a MMO. Shadowbringers starts off really strong, by introducing you to a brand new post apocalyptic world that looks really cool, and I’d say that up to Il Mheg, almost everything with the expansion is really good: the setting is good, both of the twins quests make you discover some really cool locations with interesting storylines, the exarch/crystarium are shrouded in mystery, you even get to talk to John ‘Ardbert’ Shadowbringers once again! The only thing i found kinda silly was Ranjit who’s like way too strong to be credible imo (like no character should be able to overpower the entire scions with no exposure about them to explain how come they’re so strong imo, and even by the end of the expansion him being so strong isn’t explained). But then, once you get to Il Mheg, I think the story starts to take a dive. Because the game falls back into the same old boring loop it uses for most of its runtime: go into a new locale, help the people there, get exposed to their lore, you can now progress to the new locale. Rinse and repeat. I get it, you’re in a new world, nobody knows you and everyone needs help because the apocalypse literally happened, plus you’re retracing the step of Ardbert, so it’s normal to just play the beginner adventurer, but i still think it’s boring and drags on way too much. The settings are interesting, yes, but it takes so long for the story to progress that it killed a lot of my enjoyment for it overall, and a lot of time i was just wishing this entire story would be in another game because I think shadowbringers really highlights how the MMO structure is draining away all the fun i could have with the game’s story, by making it so slow to progress. Which is a shame, because i liked the story! I don’t think it’s as good as the best games of the series, but still pretty good overall, and Emet-Selch is definitely one the coolest villains of the series. The scions are finally starting to feel like they’re actual characters and actually are a band of friends, since for the first time ever they’re all here instead of the expansion only focusing on one or two of them. The crystal exarch is also a really cool character, and even side characters like the Chai couples are pretty cool instead of just being kinda there like most side characters in previous expansions. I do have some complaints about the fact that it really feels like the end of 5.0 feels more like it’s the actual midpoint of the story rather than the end of it, which imo should be the case since you get literal credits rolling etc after it, however. And like i said, the pacing of everything in between Il Mheg and Amaurot is horrendous and really made me not enjoy this as much as i could have. That coupled to how everyone sells this as one of the greatest game of the serie really made the expansion feel underwhelming because while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t as good as i expected it to be. Maybe if i cared about the MMO aspects of it, it’d be better, but I still don’t, and at this point i’m fully convinced i would have probably have enjoyed this game’s storyline/lore better if i had watched it instead of playing it.
[Review written during 6.25]
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
idk i feel like this entire part of prompto's (back)story came out of nowhere and undermines his Brotherhood backstory that was really good + the gameplay is kinda meh i don't like this one too much